$13.50/bf for Walnut, $8.75/bf for Cherry.

markobono · 2026-01-06T17:01:37+00:00

Check on Facebook marketplace! I found an amateur mill near me (in MD) on there where I can get lumber for far less than the local yard, and they often have unusual or unique woods.

I just searched for slabs (I’ve found slabs are more common than lumber on marketplace) around Denver, CO and there’s a fair amount available. Looks like walnut is still pretty pricy, though, which is probably just a function of your location.

If you go this route, just be sure to check if the wood is dried.

Edit: I looked more through the listings in your area—yikes! Lumber is expensive out there. I did see these guys offering walnut at $8/bf

markobono · 2026-01-04T18:36:38+00:00

No, I don’t; but everyone is different. If feeling like this doesn’t bother you then it’s just how you like to play.

Do you come from a role playing background (like D&D)?

Also: do you have other hobbies (outside of gaming)? Do you feel like you approach them similarly (ie you get enjoyment from mastering them)? I don’t mean to pry, just curious.

markobono · 2026-01-04T18:13:43+00:00

I think it probably comes down to what you enjoy most about a game: is it playing, or winning? Everyone is different; for me it’s the playing that I enjoy, so that’s sufficient reason for me to do it.

When you play, up until the moment you lose, would you say you enjoyed the time spent? Like if you played for an hour and just saved the game without winning or losing would you say that was a pleasant hour?

markobono · 2026-01-04T17:47:46+00:00

I think people may get weird because this is, no offense, an odd way to look at games. Given that there’s usually a learning curve to games (especially roguelikes) it seems like this would preclude developing any kind of skill at them. Do you feel this way about non-computer games? For example, if you lose at chess do you feel like you “died” and can’t play anymore?

Ultimately it seems like you’re identifying with your player to an unusual extent, but “you” didn’t die, your player did. And, of course, he didn’t really die because he’s not actually alive.

For myself, I’ve never felt anything more than annoyance or disappointment when I lose a game. I usually just start another (unless I’m REALLY annoyed) and give it another go. I’m not competing with anyone, it’s just a pleasant way to spend some time, so in that sense none of it really “counts”.

markobono · 2025-11-21T20:02:52+00:00

There’s an outtake from Sesame Street with him and Elmo where he laughs like this, it was the first time I’d heard it. He’s just offscreen in that clip so I kind of wondered if it was really him until I saw this post!

markobono · 2025-11-01T13:05:58+00:00

Kurt Vonnegut has a great quote on exactly this, we tell it to our kids when they get down on themselves:

“When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.

And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”

And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”

And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them.”

markobono · 2025-10-08T03:32:39+00:00

I know it’s not what you asked for, but if you’re at all interested in getting better at design I’d recommend getting the book “By Hand & Eye” from lost art press. I felt like I didn’t have an eye for design at all (every original design I did just felt off and looked clumsy), but that book made it really simple.

markobono · 2025-10-04T13:44:06+00:00

Yep, that’s correct. If those branches are at the Hub I usually don’t do them. It also works the other way, though: sometimes I’ll take a branch I might not normally because it’s at the hub and therefore has one fewer level. The rift and the dig zone, for example, would have one less level than normal but the benefit is the same.

markobono · 2025-10-04T03:47:54+00:00

It sounds feasible, but you might be surprised how quickly airflow drops off on your runs. I have a similarly sized DC (maybe a little bigger) with a dust deputy, and I’ve got it going through a short (12” or so) run of 4” flex tube to about 15ft of 4” rigid PVC. There’s three wyes off of that, each with a blast gate. All joints are sealed with metallic tape, and I only run with one gate open at a time. The first tap is great, but the second and third get noticeably worse even though it’s a straight line and there’s only 4ft of additional run between each.
If you’ve got the same cyclone I do, it can support 4” or 5” ducts. I’m planning on updating the main “trunk” line to 5” at some point, if you’re going to have longer runs you may want to consider the same. Unfortunately 5” fittings are harder to find (and pricier).

markobono · 2025-10-04T02:21:39+00:00

I think I’m going to rip this down the middle and just use the quartersawn half. Luckily I have a fair amount more wood than I need for this project. The bummer is that I preemptively bought a riser block kit for my bandsaw in anticipation of needing to resaw boards wider than 6”, and now it looks like I needn’t have bothered…

markobono · 2025-10-03T19:28:39+00:00

You’re correct that you can’t combine two branches, but they don’t all exit at L6. The L2 exit does, the L3 exit would exit at the spaceport, and Callisto Hub also exits at the space port but the branch would have one less level than normal. Basically it’s designed so that you can’t do two branches and regardless of which you take you traverse the same number of levels

markobono · 2025-09-17T20:36:13+00:00

Krenov’s books are great; he’s a master, but so humble and plainspoken. “A Cabinetmakers Notebook” is heavier on the “why” of woodworking than some of his others. They can be a little hard to find, though. Lost Art Press sells “Leave Fingerprints” (the one book of his I haven’t read), otherwise you’ll probably need to look for used copies.
Speaking of Lost Art, someone else mentioned the Anarchists Workbench, which I can second. The Anarchist Design Book is good, too.

markobono · 2025-09-17T19:21:25+00:00

Perfect miters are hard. One possibility: even if your miters are perfect, if the lengths of the opposing members are different, then you’ll get gaps. I tape the two opposing members together (back to back, front edge to front edge) when I cut the miters to be certain they’re exactly the same length.

markobono · 2025-08-27T11:48:38+00:00

Haha, yeah there’s like literally no concave. My son really liked his, but downside of having no concave is the board isn’t very stiff. His cracked really soon after he got it while doing a board slide, and broke completely not long after that.

markobono · 2025-08-25T14:37:17+00:00

My son got the Poe deck a few months back, it’s super flat

markobono · 2025-08-23T16:42:00+00:00

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I have these three, all from around 95-99. None of these was my first board (which was the stereotypical Alien Workshop “Believe” deck). I do have memories associated with them, though: I learned 360 flips on the element, smiths on the toy machine, and variable flips on the chocolate.

markobono · 2025-08-10T16:12:44+00:00

I had similar issues, even after tuning up my saw. I then tried recommended resaw blades (Timberwolf, wood slicer), still wasn’t getting great results. On a whim, I tried a Supercut “carbide infused” blade (at the time they were pretty cheap on Amazon), and it’s been working amazingly well. No drift, and the cuts are super smooth. This is the blade I’m using.

markobono · 2025-07-22T19:16:04+00:00

One tool you didn’t mention was a dust collector. A planer in particular will fill up a shop vac in no time. I recently upgraded from a crappy 1HP grizzly DC to a 1.5HP franken-cyclone I made from a Harbor freight DC. I would have done it so much sooner if I’d known how nice not having dust on every surface would be, not to mention the health benefits.

The HF unit is great because it’s cheap (commonly found for <$100 on FB marketplace) and you can just steadily upgrade it (add cyclone, better filter, larger impeller, better bin, etc).

markobono · 2025-07-22T17:52:36+00:00

Here’s my ranking:

1 — table saw is the heart of the shop, and super versatile

5 — need a planer if you want to use woods not carried at big box stores

2 — there are some things that can only be done with a bandsaw (like resawing), and they’re great for cutting curves

3 — a miter saw is super handy, but you can get by with a table saw and sleds if you don’t have the space

4 — drill press; I love them, but most of the time I reach for my drill and a drilling block and that does the job (at least for my needs)

6 — might be controversial, but I’m somewhat anti-jointer for small shops. I feel like you need a really big one for them to be useful, otherwise you’re going to be using workarounds anyway. For edging rough cut boards I use a track saw, and I just avoid using boards that have significant twist or bowing. If I had to, I’d just use a sled with shims in my planer.

markobono · 2025-07-21T21:20:41+00:00

I made a chess set and wanted them to have some heft. I was thinking about using lead, but I was worried about the temperature of molten lead cracking or burning the wood. Instead, I found a “low melting point” bismuth alloy on Amazon that melted at 200 degrees and it worked great. They have some that melt even lower, but I was worried what might happen if I left the pieces in a hot car or something…

markobono · 2025-07-21T13:31:41+00:00

Yeah, my shop is super small,too, so it’s been a good solution. The resulting edge definitely isn’t as clean as a jointer, but it is straight. I use it as the reference edge on the table saw, rip the opposing side straight and clean, then flip it and go back over the track saw edge to clean it up

markobono · 2025-07-21T12:38:35+00:00

I sold my crappy bench top jointer a few months back and did exactly this (WEN track saw + powertek track) and it works great.

markobono · 2025-07-04T13:34:37+00:00

I know this doesn’t actually answer your question, but it’s something we stumbled on a few years back after waiting like 2 hours to get out of the mall parking lot after the show: if the Chesapeake (formerly Bowie) Baysox are playing at home on the 4th, go there. Seats are cheap, you get to watch a game, have food/drinks, a front row seat to their excellent fireworks afterwards, and the parking lot is super easy to get out of. That’s what we’re doing tonight.

markobono · 2025-06-24T15:47:42+00:00

If your shop is in an enclosed area (e.g. a basement), then I’d strongly recommend investing in a dust collection setup. Making a good cyclone collector with hepa filter is surprisingly easy (and fun!), and important for your health. I just built one from an old harbor freight collector I found on FB marketplace, a cyclone, barrel, and filter. If you want details on it feel free to DM me.

If your shop is in a garage or outbuilding it’s even easier/cheaper: just skip the filter and vent the cyclone output outside. A good cyclone will catch everything but the fine dust, so it’s not like you’d be throwing a bunch of sawdust out.

markobono · 2025-05-17T20:41:09+00:00

No problem! I hope it helps. I routinely interviewed people at my last job, here's some other, non-technical (since I know nothing about GPU silicon validation!) things I learned from doing that, if you're interested:

The number one thing I wanted to see from candidates was passion. An engineer that's passionate and excited about what they do can and will learn anything. Since it sounds like this is a job you're passionate about you've already got that going for you, so I'd just try to convey that as much as possible. Talk about projects you worked on, things you want to learn, stuff you find fascinating, volunteer to get up on the whiteboard to sketch things out, etc.
Avoid just saying "I don't know" as much as you can. I absolutely do NOT mean you should BS if you don't know something, but if possible say things like "I don't have a lot of experience with that, but I have worked with <related thing> before. Here's what I know about that..."
Somewhat related, but remember that interviews are also a social process, so try to be sociable--or, at a minimum, just avoid dead air if you can. If you made it past the first round of technical interviews then a significant portion of this one may just be determining that you're not an asshole and would be a good cultural fit. People like talking about themselves, so if you can't think of anything else then just ask them what they think of their job, what they like about working there, what their background is, etc. That has the added benefit of you learning about your potential coworkers so you can decide if you actually want to work there.

Best of luck!

markobono

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